"My culture train me not to be aggressive": Constructing the self and others in postgraduate accounts of multicultural groupwork

Universities who have embraced internationalisation and promise to produce graduates who are global citizens must encourage those students to capitalise on an increasingly intercultural learning environment, especially with a... [ view full abstract ]

Universities who have embraced internationalisation and promise to produce graduates who are global citizens must encourage those students to capitalise on an increasingly intercultural learning environment, especially with a view to employability. This means students must develop the necessary skills for working in multicultural teams, as required by global employers. But although groupwork – identified by practitioners and theorists as an effective learning process – is widely adopted, a tendency persists for students to resist working in mixed-national groups. While this issue has been investigated to some extent in studies focusing on the psychological factors influencing students’ attitudes, there is still a need for research that explores the discursive strategies used by students to talk about their experiences, involving participants from diverse cultural backgrounds. Our presentation contributes to addressing this gap by critically examining student accounts of difficulties arising in multicultural groupwork through the lens of identity construction. The dataset is drawn from answers to open questions at the end of a questionnaire completed by over 200 mixed-nationality postgraduates during initial and final stages of masters study at a leading UK university. The analysis is supplemented by data from follow-up interviews conducted with a subset of respondents. We explore the ways participants articulate difficulties they experienced or perceived when doing multicultural groupwork, and the identities they construct both explicitly and implicitly for themselves and others in the process. While not contradicting the results of earlier studies – namely, that language proficiency, motivation, and attitudes to time are perceived as difficulties (Turner 2009), our analysis presents a more complex picture, which emerges through the ways students position themselves in relation to their team members. The strategies by which students implicitly attribute responsibility for difficulties to others include, for example, constructing themselves as patient and understanding, thereby constructing others in terms of what they are not (cf. Ochs 1992). Our discussion concludes by offering some implications for higher education settings and suggestions for further research.